Aaron Maiwald

Projects

Research Direction: The effectiveness of pathogen data controls

I'm working on a request for proposals with Sentinel Bio on pathogen data controls (see: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aeb2689), and I'd be excited to have fellows help us resolve some key uncertainties around the effectiveness of this intervention. This ranges from mapping out the pathogen data landscape to running ML experiments that test the fungibility of experimental data for synthetic data, to drafting concrete policy proposals.

What I'm looking for in a Mentee

Given my limited availability, the ideal mentee would be very independent. They should have a solid background in biology and AI biodesign.

What I'm like as a Mentor

I won't have a lot of time, so I'm expecting to be quite hands-off, e.g. meeting once a week for 45 minutes and some low-effort slack messaging in between.

Bio

I'm a 2nd-year PhD student at Oxford University. I'm currently focused on three key workstreams: pathogen data controls, wetlab evaluations of biological design tools, and assessing the effectiveness of data filtering.